r fancy, any more than our geometry is, because
it is based on axioms our reason cannot prove. In both cases the
basic axioms are obtained from intuition; the structural work
from reason. Our knowledge of the ether may be as absolute and
exact as our knowledge of prakriti, working on physical as we
work on geometrical axioms.

The recognition of the two sources of knowledge, the work of the
spirit within us and of the mind within us, is absolutely
necessary to correctly comprehend the true significance of the
results of modern science and to accept the ancient.

Chapter Three

Matter and Ether

It is not worthwhile translating Homer into English unless the
readers of the translation understand English.

It is not worthwhile attempting to translate the occult Eastern
physics into the language of our Western and modern physics,
unless those who are to read the translation understand generally
and broadly what our own modern physics teach. It is not
necessary that they should know all branches of our modern
physics in all their minute ramifications; but it is necessary
that they should understand clearly the fundamental principles
upon which our scientific and technical knowledge of today rests.

These fundamental principles have been discovered and applied in
the past fifty years--in the memory of the living. They have
revolutionized science in all its departments. Our textbooks on
Chemistry, Light, Heat, Electricity and Sound have had to be
entirely re-written; and in many other departments, notably in
medicine and psychology, they have yet to be re-written. Our
textbooks are in a transition state, each new one going a step
farther, to make the change gradual from the old forms of belief
to the new, so that even Tyndall's textbook on "Sound" is now so
antedated, or antiquated, that it might have been written in
darkest Africa before the pyramids were built, instead of twenty
years ago.

All this change has flowed from the discovery of Faraday that
there are two states or conditions of matter. In one it is
revealed by one of our five senses, visible, tangible, smellable,
tastable, or ponderable matter. This is matter as we know it.
It may be a lump of metal or a flask of gas.

The second condition or state of matter is not revealed by either
of our five senses, but by the sixth sense, or intuition of man.
This is the ether--supposed to be "matter in a very rarefied
form, which permeates all